Author: Graham Laight
Date: 02:58:52 06/28/01
Go up one level in this thread
On June 27, 2001 at 21:15:19, Ricardo Gibert wrote: >On June 27, 2001 at 17:03:58, Bruce Moreland wrote: > >>On June 27, 2001 at 15:09:22, Dan Homan wrote: >> >>>On June 27, 2001 at 10:56:24, William H Rogers wrote: >>> >>>>It never ceases to amaze me how a small handful of people who may or may not >>>>have ever gone to college or even studied advance computer science and make >>>>statements that are 100% the opposite of some of the worlds greatest minds from >>>>all over the world have stated. The top great thinkers from almost every >>>>university in the world have defined A.I. and what it is suppost to do and yet >>>>there are a few young people here would match their intelligence againts theirs. >>>>Maybe the Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or people at M.I.T.s should look into getting >>>>rid of all of their Phd's and call you guys. >>>>A.I., as it has been losely defined is the ability of a device to solve or make >>>>decisions regarding a specific problem. How the machine was designed or >>>>programmed is not the point, it is what it does afterward when it is turned on >>>>and ran. >>>>Not trying to stir up more waves, but I have studied this matter for years. >>>>If you disagree, good, but just don't rewrite the worlds greatest accepted >>>>facts. >>>>Bill >>> >>>Hi, >>> >>>I am not sure that there is this universally agreed upon definition of >>>artificial intelligence that you quote. Perhaps the first expert in computers, >>>Alan Turing, came up with the 'Turing Test' for artificial intelligence. His >>>test is that you can ask the machine any twenty questions you want by typing >>>into a terminal and the answers appear on the screen. If you cannot tell >>>whether the answers were given by the machine itself or another human (who might >>>be hidden in another room), then the machine is said to be 'intelligent'. >> >>The Turing test seems stupid to me, and I have no idea why it is touted as some >>sort of standard of anything. It measures a program's ability to generalize in >>the domain of light conversation. That's a fine thing to try to write a program >>to do, and it's a hard problem, but it doesn't make sense to draw a line and say >>that programs that can successfully make light conversation are intelligent and >>those that can't aren't, in some absolute sense. There is no universal constant >>H, which is defined as the capabilities of a human, that also defines >>intelligent behavior. >> >>A dog can exhibit intelligent behavior, without coming anywhere close to being >>able to pass the Turing test. Likewise, there are many humans who cannot >>successfully impersonate a particular human. If you disbelieve this, just watch >>"To Tell the Truth" on TV. >> >>AI is not about making something that can solve the Turing test. There are lots >>of AI problems that have nothing to do with being able to simulate light >>conversation. >> >>bruce > > >Perhaps your notion of intelligence can be distilled into: The ability to find >good solutions to NP hard problems. In that case, Lotus 123 (a spreadsheet) is intelligent. The "solver" menu options will both find numerical solutions to equations, and optimise the value of a given cell by modifying the values of other cells. And it will do it a whole lot quicker than any human could. I'm afraid I disagree with Bruce. I think the Turing test is good for the following reasons: * for better or for worse, it has become a standard which must be met - a global yardstick for comparing human intelligence with computers * it requires linguistic skill * it requires storage and fast, accurate retrieval of a huge amount of knowledge * progress on this test reflects the reality of the progress of computers against the human brain in terms of producing the right output for a given input (at the moment, computers can fool about 20-25 % of the population on the Turing test). The basic problem with Bruce's argument is that, as far as I can tell, anything that can do anything better than a human brain would have to be regarded as intelligent (e.g. mechanical calculators, Napier's Bones, etc). The weakness of the Turing test is that it does not take account of visual ability. -g
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.